steven moffat quotes

I don't think, generally speaking, people become writers because they were the really good, really cool, attractive kid in class. I'll be honest. This is our revenge for people who were much better looking and more popular than us. I was a bit like that, I suppose.

I know this is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize for it, but if you can write comedy, you can pretty much write anything, because it's the hardest. It's the most technically demanding, the most precisely evaluated form of writing. People know if it works or not. There's a big button marked 'fail,' and that's when nobody laughs.

I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' - now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.

When you're surrounded by friends and exes, there's a whole lot of stuff that starts crawling out. But however serious and traumatic those experiences may be to the participant, to the onlooker they're hilarious.

People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.

The trouble with a series as it gets older is it can feel like a tradition, and tradition is the enemy of suspense, and it's the enemy of comedy. It's the enemy of everything, really. So you have to shake it up.

I absolutely love television, and I don't mean to be vulgar, but as I keep having to explain to people from the movie industry, I get more power and more money doing television, so why on earth would I do a film?